Thoughts on Agent Themed Instanssi 2014

You can check out some of the results. Not all is suitable for work unless you like strange stares so take care.

Personally I participated in a little agent themed competition where you were supposed to crack series of codes. I even wrote a tiny decoder to avoid using clunky, paper based one. Overall it was a nice challenge and I would not mind taking part again. I also learned to pick simple locks at a workshop. Maybe that skill comes in handy some day.

effectserver-client - Controlling Lights Using Node.js

As Instanssi provides programmable lighting through a simple UDP interface I decided to play around with them a little. As a result of my experiments I ended up releasing a small Node based library. effectserver-client abstracts UDP and provides simple means to animate the lights. The library comes with a couple of sample effects.

Of course it's an useless library unless there is suitable hardware around. It would be a good exercise to write an UDP server that works with the client and then provide a visualization for that. Perhaps that is something I will do next year. Or sooner even if there's sufficient motivation and reason to do that.

Conclusion

I hope we see Instanssi again next year. It's not a very big event but that in part makes the atmosphere nice and cozy. This is one of those things I value in Finland very much. It is excellent to have a local community that keeps these kind of events alive. You don't have that everywhere.